Have You Heard Of... Kenojuak Ashevak?

Kenojuak Ashevak was an Inuit artist.

 

Kenojuak was born in October 1927 in Ikirasaq, an Inuit camp in the snowy Arctic landscape of Baffin island, Canada. Traditional Inuit camps consisted of skin tents and igloos, and Kenojuak spent the early part of her life living the semi-nomadic lifestyle of her community, moving from camp to camp to follow the hunting and the seasons.

 

As a young married woman and mother, diagnosed with tuberculosis, Kenojuak had to leave her family and community and spend some years in hospital in Québec City. It was here that she made traditional dolls and beadwork as a way to fill the days and generate a little income.

 

Back home, Kenojuak was encouraged to draw on paper by a local government administrator, James Houston, who ran with the idea that the Inuit community, with its distinctive artistic talent, could create an extra income from selling its artwork. James opened a printmaking workshop in Cape Dorset, with the aim of selling work to the South. Kenojuak’s designs, transferred to stone and made into lithographic prints, were an immediate hit.

 

Kenojuak didn’t use an eraser. Her drawings formed in her head, and she simply drew them, with a pencil, on the paper. She drew birds, animals, and the landscape around her, from observed, absorbed life and from direct imagination. This boldness, with her instinctive, confident knowledge of line and form, gave her work a graphic purity and elegance, which is appealing to this day. Although her work naturally evolved through the years, eventually returning to a semblance of the bold simplicity of her start, Kenojuak’s distinctive natural style is instantly recognisable in all of it.

 

As Kenojuak’s work gained more and more attention, opportunities for travel and exhibitions took her all over the world. Her designs were made into Canadian stamps and coins, and Kenojuak won many prizes and awards for her work.

 

Kenojuak died in 2013, in Cape Dorset, Baffin Island. 

 

Have You Heard Of..?Trudi Murray